RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Didn't she confuse de facto and de jure?
https://twitter.com/RogerSeverino_/status/1587611399668342790
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
they might have let some of the missiles get through, lol. This is just too comical.
What world are you living in? Plenty of Iranian missiles got through. It's right there on video. Are people unironically believing the Israeli '99% shot down' routine?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Just get rid of the regulations! It's insane. In Australia, nuclear power is illegal - we're actually trying to buy US nuclear submarines because they're superior to conventional subs in range. But no, we can't have nuclear energy for civilians despite having by far the biggest uranium reserves on earth. Our geography is stable and technology is quite advanced. We have a research reactor. We should be a nuclear energy superpower, mining and enriching and building reactors.
Stalin blamed Soviet economic problems on 'wreckers', workers deliberately sabotaging machinery, undermining morale, giving false orders. Ironically the wrecking came from the top down, in incentives, laws and institutions that undermined performance. That's the problem the West faces - industry taking body blows from regulators on housing, energy, production and so on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them.
What do you mean by this? I thought Trump just executed the Sailor strategy and appealed to the neglected Republican base. He might not have thought about it mathematically, he's a great politician by instinct rather than calculation... but in principle a calculator could've done that and concluded that was the way to go. Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump, he has sincere aesthetic beliefs and style yet will do whatever seems easiest decision-to-decision. Consider all the swamp creatures he appointed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
The distance from Northern Ukraine to Moscow is significantly less than from the Baltics to Moscow, 460 km to 600 km which is relevant to a decapitation strike. Missile defence based in Ukraine would also complicate Russian nuclear strikes. They would have to defend thousands of kilometres of extra airspace in addition to the Belarus-St Petersburg area.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is not known for its excellence, they aren't in a position to to lose bases to NATO warships. Given the interest British and US warships seem to have in the Black Sea, it's likely there'd be many AEGIS-equipped ships in Crimea or the Sea of Azov. This obviously limits Russian power-projection abilities, their ability to support Syria or other allies.
And what happens once Ukraine joins NATO? Everyone and their dog has been saying this will happen for years now.
"Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership," Blinken told reporters in Brussels.
You're not supposed to be able to join NATO with territorial disputes - yet NATO training and integration has continued through 2014, through 2022 and continues to this day despite this. Suppose they amend the 'no territorial disputes' clause or strategically ignore it like Blinken does to bring in Ukraine and Ukraine moved on Donbass in a counter-factual where Russia didn't invade. Then Russia would be forced to choose between losing Donbass or war with NATO.
Furthermore, it's a basic strategic principle that great powers don't want their neighbours to be members of hostile alliance groups. Everyone knows that Russia was extremely unhappy with the idea of Ukraine being in NATO, Burns's 'nyet means nyet' cable shows this. We can identify efforts to prevent this in Russian strategy - debt relief and energy subsidies pre-2014 and increasingly intense economic and military pressure since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
There's a difference between fixing a broken car and converting your car into a boat or vis versa. Fixing the car brings it closer to the Platonic ideal of what the car is supposed to be, converting it into a boat is something different.
I think Christians have a level of innate bioconservatism, Adam was directly made by God. You're not supposed to mess with God's vision, maleness or femaleness.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
Is this evidence of the cathedral being less monolithically progressive than commonly believed?
Let's wait and see. I'm reminded of the time when Zhou Enlai said "Too soon to say" when asked about the consequences of the French Revolution. It turns out that was actually a myth and he was talking about 1968 France.
Nevertheless, the day of the announcement is too premature. Lots of people thought that Brexit and the 2016 election were turning points, that narratives were beginning to fall apart, that the tide was shifting.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Mossad's been gunning down Iranian researchers for ages - you are not proposing a new idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Would you send your child on an exchange trip to live with the American black, like you might to Finland? OK, realistically you wouldn't torture your child with a language that isn't even Indo-European and the freezing cold. But my point stands - there are significant differences. Do you want to swap everyone in your community for Finns or US blacks?
If race is such a non-issue, why do Americans tend to cluster up so much? The Bronx used to be renowned for how boring and peaceful it was, back when it was predominantly 'ethnic' white. People were leaving their doors open at night for fresh air. Then blacks moved in, whites moved out. Crime shot up. People were burning down houses to get the insurance - not a conventional business strategy. Same thing happened in Detroit, in certain parts of Chicago.
In Australia we have the exact same thing with our local indigenous population. Sky-high rates of violence, poverty, drug addiction (petrol can be a drug if you really try) and welfare use. Right now we're having this drama over a youth curfew in Alice Springs, where the usual suspects are complaining that it doesn't fix the structural problems. They're right - the youths switched to being violent in the suburbs in a perfect display of incentives. Meanwhile the local police are getting reamed for having a mock awards ceremony where they gave out 'Coon of the year award' awarded to the 'person who has displayed outstanding lack of excellence in the area of personal hygiene or feral behaviour' and presented the winner with a club captured from some patrol. They can tell, they just know that there are significant differences between black and white. They're taught not to do this, they have incentives not to do this but they can't resist what their own eyes, ears and noses tell them.
I don't want to send my child to a school full of Chinese kids because they'll probably torture him with excessive homework and academic competitiveness. With blacks, the torture can be more literal. You can read 'Letter from a Mom About School' for an example:
The assault on the school bus was so horrifying for her that she literally soiled herself in fear. She dared to tell a group of black kids on the bus to stop hitting a younger white child in the head and to leave him alone. For that, she was attacked, taken down to the floor of the bus, and stomped on.
She had a footprint on her forehead and when I took her to the urgent care, she had a sprained neck and was covered in bruises. When I took the medical records and photos taken by the doctor to the school and demanded that something be done, I was told that because an ambulance was not needed, it was not considered an assault.
I asked my daughter what the bus driver did while all this was going on, and she said nothing. When I contacted the school, I was told that the bus driver (who was black) had not reported the attack.
The result of the school’s investigation was to subsequently suspend my daughter for the same amount of days as the perpetrators because one of them had a scratch on his leg (where she tried to get away from the attack.)
It goes on and on, Colin Flaherty writes books of this stuff. Crime statistics are made of this stuff. A casual glance at certain cities and countries tells us this stuff. Some populations are just not suited to civilization, just as others are.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Should we have a 'should be longer' and 'should be shorter' upvote/downvote button?
A good few reported comments make a point but I believe the real problem with them is that they don't substantiate their claims or elaborate. They can't, nobody can in only a few sentences.
Alternately, there are some top-level and mid-level posts that are so long my eyes just glaze over and I scroll onwards. I'm wary of doing that myself and try to prune things down. That comes at the cost of detail, I sometimes end up letting considerable weight rest on single word qualifiers I add where perhaps sentences are needed. Scylla and Charybdis. I don't know how hard length-voting would be or if anyone else cares. Opinions?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
With AI narratives they can point to trends and those trends are undeniably real! Nobody said 'oh AGI is impossible because the number of transistors on a chip is decreasing, we're actually heading for artificial stupidity', that would be silly. Furthermore, AI development is fundamentally unpredictable, people talk about probabilities of developing certain technologies by certain times.
Climate change is supposed to be a clear physical-material trend, yet there's been confusion about which direction it's moving and what consequences there might be and when they arrive. If they could get it wrong in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s they can get it wrong today. The Pentagon report for instance:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK’s leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon’s internal fears should prove the ‘tipping point’ in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.
Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon’s dire warnings could no longer be ignored.
Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. ‘We don’t know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,’ he said. ‘The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.’
These weren't no-names or non-scientists but they were seriously and embarrassingly wrong. Imagine if we actually listened to these people, speedily cut fossil fuels out of the world economy accepting the energy rationing, economic mobilization and famines that would likely happen... only for it to be a nothingburger.
In AI there are clear achievements and errors on both sides - some people said we'd get self-driving vehicles by 2000, others by 2030, others never. Well, we have self-driving cars today. We have GPT-4. Things the AI alarmists foresaw actually showed up, perhaps not on time but they did arrive!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
The US was not exactly thrilled by hostile forces extending their influence into its hemisphere during the Cold War (or any other time really), especially the forward basing of missiles. It's expected that great powers will try to avoid this.
Sensors and missiles based in Ukraine are relevant to nuclear warfare, as are Ukraine's claims to Donbass and Crimea.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK’s leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon’s internal fears should prove the ‘tipping point’ in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.
Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon’s dire warnings could no longer be ignored.
So scientists find a speculative report by non-scientists and trumpet it as 'this is why you should reduce Co2 emissions'. It's just like the IPCC reports. They're tremendously dull documents that say things like 'high confidence that water stress will moderately increase in the medium term' and don't mention any existential threat except to Pacific islands. Meanwhile Extinction Rebellion is screeching about the apocalypse. Meanwhile governments are signing legal targets that commit them to deindustrialization and high energy costs, shutting down farms and so on.
There's a gap between what actual scientists are saying and what the message flowing through to policymakers, celebrities, media and the public is. Rather like COVID, the real science on mass-scale mask use was mixed and unclear, yet the Science mandated them.
James Hansen is/was screeching about disaster, the Arctic was supposed to melt about 10 years ago: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1988&dat=20080624&id=7mgiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7qkFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5563,4123490
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
The reason I wouldn't be a good financial planner is that I don't really come up with new ideas that often. If I was in an office people would just see me doing nothing 90% of the time rather than busily making new reports. But laziness can work really well. Imagine the stock picker who just said 'buy Apple' for ten years in a row, he'd beat SPY and the sweaty actively trading index fund managers.
Right now I am basically all in on AI and crypto, my theory is that it's still undervalued. I believe that OpenAI is cooking something big, GPT-4 is still a top-tier AI and it's a year old with a few updates. What are they doing with all their huge infrastructure spending if not producing next gen models? Just the other day I saw a paper about how you could push up accuracy by having AI models vote on the right answer, getting the wisdom of the crowd. The bitter lesson of AI scaling is that pumping in more compute beats clever fine-tuning, this is the kind of simple trick that works well.
There have got to be a tonne of killer apps yet to be produced with this technology. AI Dungeon for instance, what happened there? It was running off GPT-3 before censoring down to oblivion, there's clearly a market out there for it. Klarna is replacing its customer service people with bots. We've got Suno in music... Yes, NVIDIA stock went down 10% the other day - lots of people seem to think it's a bubble but I disagree. My AGIX went up 15% (what a brilliant name, AGIX, people are sure to buy in on press releases about AGI!). I'm happy to live with volatility, same with crypto.
I also think fossil fuels are undervalued. I have only a small position there since I think tech is worth more but since all the attention and prestige is going towards renewables, I think coal and gas deserve more love. Yes, everyone in the developed world is racing to decarbonize. But industrializing countries are raving about coal, Modi was boasting about reaching a billion tonnes of coal production: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422
China is building up more coal too: it's a reliable, cheap baseload energy source and you can place it anywhere you like, right next to the factory. It needs to be replaced in the long term of course but replacing coal is hard. Germany's been scrambling to get more coal and they've been a huge investor into renewables. DEI funds loathe coal and universities try to divest... There are also wartime price surges as we've seen with the Ukraine war and energy shortages.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested
Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people? Consider the story of the dangerous teen who was going to die of a heart condition, got a transplant refused for being obviously low-value, got national press attention for being black, got the heart transplant and promptly got himself killed in a police chase a couple of years later?
Can't you conceive that people think it's unjust? There's not many spare hearts floating around, he was given a rare chance due to race (and naivete) and squandered it.
Or the Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread where this liberal sees a formerly white suburb being violently ethnically cleansed by blacks but he and the authority figures can only process it through the lens of 'damn, it'd be racial dynamite - we'd better cover it up so the Klan doesn't hear about this!' and 'well pretty soon the problem will be solved because there won't be any more elderly whites living here'.
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984
Or the Rotherham grooming scandal where vast-majority Pakistani Muslims were raping vast-majority white girls only for the police to cover it up lest they seem racist. That got swept under the rug, along with all kinds of cases where blacks murder whites - but there's always coverage on the latest updates for the Emmett Till case, or the ongoing worship of George Floyd as some kind of secular saint. The privileging of blacks over experienced air traffic controllers recently, or pervasive diversity quotas throughout the Anglosphere (the RAF for instance). University entrance quotas.
People think these things are unjust and they see HBD as a way to counter the root cause - the narrative of white racism causing innately equal groups to stratify. They see insult as well as injury when the media goes out of its way to present whites as incompetent, bad-tempered and criminal: https://twitter.com/stupidwhiteads
the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero
What happened to colour-blind meritocracy? It got eaten by DEI because blank-slatists conclude that different outcomes are caused by discrimination. Unless you have HBD, there's no chance of getting colour-blind meritocracy. The fallback narrative of 'oh, if we went out and told US blacks they were actually just stupid and violent, they'd have a massive violent tantrum' is silly. They already are massively violent and bitterly resentful of whites. Strengthening and heightening that attitude with anti-white media worsens the problem. What kind of social stability are you buying that's worth wrecked cities, obliterated communities, endless crime, occasional mass riots and (since in this context we're accepting HBD but being too cowardly to admit it) knowing that you'll be paying this price forever?
If we don't get rid of the racism narrative now, what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees' show up from sub-Saharan Africa complaining that we oppressed them/droughted them and demand free things? Or when superintelligence gets made by the Google/Microsoft blob that pre-program in the racism narrative?
One thing that was proven to work is giving young women baby dolls to look after. The US tried that in an effort to reduce teenage pregnancies only to observe the opposite effect.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-pregnancy/
I think the tone is rather ghoulish here - how can we prevent people having children so they can move onto brighter futures? Ultimately this all comes back to Ehrlich and the Club of Rome - strong contenders for the biggest civilizational wrecker of all time IMO. The Population Bomb proposed all kinds of fertility-reducing interventions, many of which seem to have been taken up. One of the architects of China's One Child Policy went off to the Club of Rome, I trace that immense source of human misery back to their stupid ideas. There's a pervasive meme of overpopulation floating around - the very concept defies reason. More people means more innovation, production, efficiencies of scale. In a Malthusian model, ok sure overpopulation is a thing. The West does not live in a Malthusian world, not since Malthus's time. If we want more resources, let's go out and get them - the Arctic and Antarctic, the sea floor, the vast frontiers of space.
It's particularly pernicious to encourage socially responsible, highly educated smart people to throw their genes into the shredder by making it culturally 'irresponsible'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
If Biden wanted to reduce petrol prices, he wouldn't have banned keystone XL on day 1. January 20th, the first thing he did was block a pipeline. Then he put a moratorium on exploration in public lands. Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas (imagine being European at this point, trusting in an 'ally' that behaves like this).
Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment. But Biden has been relatively anti-fossil fuel.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
'From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free' isn't even egregious as a phrase. They want borders to be changed. Israel also wants borders to be changed - they've changed them in past wars, annexing the Golan Heights amongst other things! Spain wants Gibraltar back. Ukraine wants Crimea back. Russia wants Novorussia back. Japan wants the Kuril Islands back...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes
Saying 'From the river to the sea' doesn't neccessarily require violence (though realistically it would need a lot of bloody fighting), 'kill the Boer' is a clear call for violence, despite considerable effort from the NYT and leftist media to obfuscate it.
Right-wing commenters claim that an old anti-apartheid chant is a call to anti-white violence, but historians and the left-wing politician who embraces it say it should not be taken literally.
In theory, you could have some kind of non-violent settlement where Palestine gets the territory they want. It's extremely unlikely of course, all kinds of things would need to go wrong for Israel. But in principle it's possible. And that's not even 'not taking it literally' which can apparently be done for much more overt statements. Far easier to 'not take literally' abstract ideas like freedom, as opposed to killing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
France and Britain have H-bombs, why would they fear Russia? It's idiotic to wage a proxy war against your natural energy supplier, they only do it because the US is dragging them along (and not inconsiderable Euro brainrot).
Why would Russia invade NATO countries and risk nuclear war? Risk-benefit doesn't stack up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
US foreign policy is schizophrenic. Why would anyone want to negotiate with the US at this point? Obama takes great pains to advance diplomacy with Iran and join the TPP - Trump immediately reneges on the nuclear deal and leaves the TPP - maximum pressure and trade wars! Biden wants to go back to Obama policies on Iran and climate. Why should anyone trust in his word when the next guy can negate it?
Trump wants to throw Ukraine under the bus. Well, fair enough. May as well get off the sinking ship in a lifeboat rather than swim in the cold. But it's still not consistent, it's confused and certainly does Zelensky no good.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Do you think that first society is going to have solid investment in research, developed logistics, good infrastructure?
I think they'll have all those things precisely because they know they're needed for strength.
It's the societies that favour weakness that are going to lag on infrastructure and research. It's not fair that some people are better at engineering, at innovating, at making new things. Stupid people can be #RealScientists too. Money should be redistributed from them to the non-productive. Everyone has positive rights, there are no responsibilities. Martially minded people are dangerous and give the ick, they need to be controlled and restrained (maybe to Harrison Bergeron levels). Lo and behold this society isn't going to last very long.
Strength is good actually, big armies are useful. What good is it to have scientists if they're whisked off by someone else? What good is it to have infrastructure if someone else marches in and takes the trains and ships? All these things are good in as far as they translate back into strength. There are ways to overstress and damage people, tradeoffs between long-term and short-term, game-theoretic considerations in many-player games... Yet strength is still good.
cherry-picking of instances that serve your argument
So far I've brought up space capabilities, naval power, air power, high tech industries like car factories, high quality scientific papers, AI, urban development and skylines, cybercriminals, green industry, coal production, diplomatic influence, cybercrime, market reforms, resistance to colonizers and post-WW2 military performance. Is that cherry-picking?
Where does India outperform China? In a green index which declares the Philippines a major leader? Meanwhile, big industrial powers like Taiwan, China and South Korea are right at the bottom.
India's level of development is just lower. I have a special interest in military affairs - the comparison is marked. The Indian army - a whole fleet of Russian T-90s and T-72s, Russian BMP-2s, Russian Tunguskas, Konkurs, Iglas. There are some Indian light vehicles, helicopters and missiles but even Brahmos is codeveloped with Russia. Most of their arsenal is imported. It's the same in aviation, they fly Migs, Su-30s, Rafales, Jaguars... and a few domestically produced and long-delayed Tejas fighters.
China is a different story. Nearly all their vehicles and equipment is made domestically. Like India they bought aircraft from the Soviets but supplemented them with hundreds of domestic J-10s and their own 5th gen aircraft, which India doesn't have at all.
India has lower CO2 emissions than China and higher birthrates. That's it. OP's original point was that China wasn't much more successful than India, which is bizarre. China is way more successful than India.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
The only way there is any headway for the economy is through the establishment of Special Economic Zones
Case in point. China created SEZs, India didn't. China deregulated its economy, India didn't. Was Chinese liberalization traumatic, were there people angry about losing their iron rice bowls, was there inflation and inequality? Of course! Yet they struggled through rather than shying away from reform. You say 'weak state, strong society', I say 'qualitative difference'. Build up a strong state, change those labour laws, compete or lose - that's the rule of this world.
Yeah, you wouldn't have happened to hear about the 700 years of constant Islamic conquest
Did China have foreign invasions? Yes, they had to deal with the Mongols and the Manchus. They had to deal with the Japanese. They had to deal with the Europeans too.
Yeah, the seat that the UN originally offered to India and India conceded to China.
OK, so India made a massive blunder helping the PRC. Nevertheless China was rewarded for its wartime performance with a veto, they used their strength and diplomatic abilities to take their seat from ROC. And it's the same today. All around the world, China flexes its muscles - they help Russia in Ukraine, they arrange Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. What does India do? Buy Russian oil and military technology because their own defence-industrial base is pretty poor. India's influence in world affairs? Pretty minimal.
Why do you think China that dropped down to 51st spot on Climate Change Performance Index is better than India that ranks 7th.
The reason India ranks so highly on the Climate Change Performance Index is because it's poor - I bet if they included Congo or Malawi they'd be even higher still - the Phillipines is even higher than India. Very low emissions there! Climate change is a joke and the Chinese clearly don't care - they're building loads of coal power as well. Yet they see renewables as a market to dominate like all the others.
Modi boasts about reaching 1/4 of Chinese coal production, India doesn't care either but they'll opportunistically ask for aid: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422
Compare the national attitudes! China says 'we're a renewables/electric cars/industrial superpower' as they advance their own global strategy as a competitor to the West, India says 'give us more money', coming to the West as a supplicant.
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that season 1 was made by Nic Pizzolatto, season 4 was made by Issa López.
I think men and women think differently about stories, media and what matters in them. This is over populations of course, exceptions exist. There are male ways of telling a story - plot-focused, rational, consistent setting, character agency, combat, violence, progression and character advancement. Then there are female ways of telling a story - character-focused, plot doesn't necessarily make sense, emphasis on emotions and romance. Great writers can appeal to both but that's hard. You can tell I don't really understand or appreciate the female side of things.
I think this is most obvious with the weakest, most unrestrained authors. If you go on FFN or spacebattles or webnovel, you find stories about men advancing their position with hard work and clever tactics. They fight and overcome enemies and court women, sometimes getting a harem. In the case of Harry Potter stories, there's a trope of Harry Potter hitting the gym, using some rituals to get stronger, taking control of his money from Dumbledore and getting a harem of hot Slytherins. If you go through and search by likes, that's what you'll see.
Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches - Revenge is Best Served Raw
Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin
Meanwhile on female dominated places like AO3, you find endless romance and homosexuality. Putting the ocean of Harry/Draco to one side, there's a huge emphasis on shipping. Who do people end up with? Are there love triangles? Can there be more love triangles? Angst, rape, therapy? Plot is unimportant in and of itself, character relationships are exciting. There are even tagging features so you can search for exactly what ship you want. Often they take characters out of their world (not mechanically like an isekai) and reimagine them in a different setting - they could be at a normal high school together. Just to make sure there's no combat. Or they make up this 'soulmate' mechanic where people can write words on eachother's skin. It's a whole other world to male fiction.
Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love
you've got the antidote for me
Now if you're like me you might feel a little cringe at the male power fantasy stories. I imagine most here have more exacting standards of taste. But you'll feel revulsion at 370,000 words of:
'Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve until her mind can be cracked.'
Or:
"Sirius is in boarding school, Remus is in hospital, and they don't know each other until Sirius texts the wrong number."
Who cares about this stuff? Well, apparently women like it. I blame the influence of women on Star Wars. George Lucas's Star Wars was telling a male story, Kathleen Kennedy was telling a female story (boy does AO3 love Rey/Kylo). It's less obvious at this higher level since it's not out in your face but it is still there. Likewise in True Detective, I imagine.
A few places? Where's the Indian space station, where's the Indian navy, the Indian air force, the Indian high-tech industries in comparison to China? Where are the robotized gigafactories?
Xiaomi car factory: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5KhnLLpoQ0
High quality scientific papers by country: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/annual-tables/2022/country/all/all
India is apparently less scientifically productive than Australia, albeit improving. The population of Australia is 26.6 million. There's an absolutely monstrous gap between India and China. China makes 5x more cars than India, they're so far ahead in AI and computing it's incomparable. In China big cities have this cyberpunk aesthetic - during COVID lockdowns they had drones flying around saying "Please restrain your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing." I don't want to live there - I want freedom and artistic expression. Even so, the aesthetic is pretty good!
Shanghai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bw3yXaVHuLs
Big Indian cities have a Malthusian slum aesthetic - a totally different kind of dystopia. When it comes to cybercrime, Indian thieves tend to prefer scamming credulous octogenarians with gift cards - Chinese hackers steal 5G tech, turbines, sensitive and secret documents. When it comes to climate change, China builds all the solar panels and wind turbines, India asks for climate finance. There's a qualitative difference between India and China.
Mumbai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gV5EU6daoVI
Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized. They fought bravely and desperately against all comers rather than rolling over. China was if not one of the Big Three in WW2, at least the Fourth of Roosevelt's Four Policemen. They got their UNSC veto, India begs for one. Postwar, China fought the US to a stalemate in Korea, skirmished with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. India just clobbered Pakistan a couple of times and lost a skirmish with China.
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